Rich Baiocco

All this good stuff came about the same day. Love getting mail that ISNT a damn bill.

So there’s Duke Ellington in music, and cinema’s got Werner Herzog (herzog is similar to the title of Duke in German, the filmmaker changed his last name to Herzog when he first started out because he felt cinema needed a Duke like music’s Ellington).  Now there’s the Duke of Zines writing and distributing and publishing great things off the Hard 50 Farm in Kansas: Jessie Duke. (pretty bad ass interview here) Read this collection, especially the story Pulling The Life From Spring. This type of candor is rare, even among zines, which, if nothing else, at their best are the purest candor.   

Sample: “Tonight a young raccoon will scale the paddock fence, move the cement slab that leans against the duck-house door, and jimmy the latch open. She doesn’t have a chance.// In the morning I’ll hide in bed while James digs a hole for Jenny. It’s gotta be deep so nothin’ digs her up. I wonder how James keeps track of all the holes he’s dug. There aren’t any markers, far as I can tell. This is the hardest part for me. Knowing someone’s going in the ground. I don’t know where any of them are buried. I can’t know.”

There are 2 more stories from Duke, a poem from an unknown source & a rambler from Adam Gnade called Gospel Plow that was especially hard to read after the Connecticut school shootings, but nonetheless drew my attention and forced me to acknowledge the complexity of my sympathies towards the 2nd amendment. if im sympathetic at all, I found out within myself it’s not a simple sympathy.

Cool zine from 2 great writers. You can get The Hard Fifty Farm zine here 

Got a sweet handpainted holiday card from Kevin Augustine and Lone Wolf Tribe. Since moving to San Francisco I’ve stopped working with The Tribe, but I am a huge fan of their theatre productions (lately dealing with stories that give voice to the complex problems of Veteran suicides, Soldiers returning home, Animal Cruelty, the nature of creation, and the boundlessness of the human spirit) and while living in Brooklyn, LWT was a major part of my life, a creative outlet, and my ticket to a short-lived life as a touring actor in Brazil.  Happy Holidays Kev - Postcard’s beautiful!

If you’d like to buy one or check out their other cards and merch, go to the Lone Wolf Tribe facebook page for their store.

Also got this rad postcard from a zine festival in South Korea via this mad essay-writing-motherfucker Bart.  Thanks man, Happy 2013 - May the doors be blown clean off by your engines

I don’t have enough money/Proof of Residency to get a California Driver’s license (YET) but I got a San Francisco Pubic Library card.  Even that wasn’t easy.  I had to mail myself a postcard to prove that I receive mail at my girlfriend’s adddress…I do.  I brought the librarian the postmarked postcard and I now own more Public Library cards (4) in my life than I have cell phones (3). 

Support Your Local Library. Some of them even carry rare Richard Yates short story collections that the used bookstores don’t often get.

Speaking of support, I can’t get enough of this photograph.  

I’ve seen it on a book cover before, but for some reason this wider shot just mesmerizes me.  Maybe it memorizes me, actually, and I go on auto-pilot looking at it. 

To find out who took it, and read a great essay on farm life in Nebraska, click here

~rjb

1.  Last week, FOR FREE,  I stood in a field in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and listened to Merle Haggard sing ‘Silver Wings’ and my favorite song ‘Mama Tried’ with Kris Kristofferson.  Stood in a different field in the same Golden Gate Park in San Francisco the very next day at the same exact time and listened to Bob Mould sing ‘Hoover Dam’.  

2.  On the plane back to NYC I read a novel from cover to cover.  It was called The Green And The Gold and if you’d like to read it you should order it here.  It’s possible to call it a book about the Midwest, but it’s more specifically Great Plains literature, a little more isolated, a little more touched by Western Winds.  In one way, youthful Carrick Williams attempts young manhood and escape from a desolate town via college in the big city—Lincoln, Nebraska.  In another way, an earnest human being bucks and lurches and revolts and clutches and grabs and needs and dreams and dares and pounds and grapples with life.  Either way, the early work of Bartholomew Geronimo Tyrannosaurus Rex Schaneman.  Read him.   

3.  Had a birthday.  Had a plan to be back in California, had a lease to be in New York City, had a yearning to be on a friend’s farm in Kansas with a movie camera and instruments and a trunk full of books to trade around. Spent the day working on these so called books, spent the day lining up my wants with my needs.  Cooked tagliatelle bolognese for me and my old man and the two of us watched baseball and drank wine all night.

4. Spent a day outlining a fallen veteran’s dead body in chalk as part of a street theatre performance in Brooklyn with the company I work with, Lone Wolf Tribe, in an attempt to remind folks that this war has been going on for 10 Motherfucking Years now and the confusion and psychological toll it can take on soldiers returning from overseas shouldn’t be overlooked, or forgotten, or snuffed under a carpet or mistreated because of crappy/limited/unaffordable healthcare plans.  The VA’s recent spring report stated 18 veteran suicides occur in the United States every single day.

5.  Got a call to take the train up to the Bronx as quickly as I can to be at my dying Grandmother’s bedside.  She’d been living at my folks’ house for the past 16 months and at some point it sinks in that the end would be near.  My family and I said to ourselves, to each other “we’re ready for this,” but when it is actually happening you are never ready for it.  She’d been having trouble breathing and was rushed to a hospital, which I found out when I got there, was a hospice. Terminal care. The place was called Cavalry, fittingly.  Cavalry is coming. Greater help is on the way.  I ran into room #517 panting—Brooklyn to the Bronx wasn’t exactly around the corner—but it was too late even for good-byes.  She was mostly unconscious, her eyes heavy and glazed in a haldol/morphine dream, her mouth slack and stuck open in an unnerving yawn.  At an earlier time in my life my Grandmother’s encouragement provided the only faith I had in my shaky, unconfident identity, and seeing her mouth open like that, like a giant open vent, like life could so easily stay inside or escape forever brought me right back to that younger, shaky self, and I felt my knees go soft and that icy, tearful sensation mount in my skull.  My mom fixed her mother’s hair—a desperate habit—parted it neatly and combed it back off her forehead with her palm.  She looked at me at some point and asked why I had chalk all over my hands and my pants.  I couldn’t remember.

Yesterday she passed away.  My mom was the only one with her and she died in her arms, curling her lips and blowing three times in a soft death rattle before her breath calmed, then ceased.  They had a lifetime of mother/daughter issues as most mothers and daughters have, which never fully got worked out, but I can only hope in that final spasm of communication an understanding was embraced.  Of course some secrets are to be kept between mothers and daughters only.

Tomorrow we lay to rest in the ground the finest Baker’s assistant to ever walk the earth—Phyllis Greco.  She can finally join the love of her life, my Grandfather, the Finest Italian Pastry Chef i’ve ever known, who died early with a mouth full of blood, a heart full of love and a head full of dreams.  Maybe they’ll re-open their bakery some day—they had it, Greco’s Pastries, here in the Bronx on Morris Park Avenue for 50 years.  I never once believed Death is the end of anyone you love.